Julius Onah

The most interesting thing in Captain America: Brave New World (2025) is not a punch. It is Sam Wilson, played by Anthony Mackie, a man who is not a super-soldier but a fellow in a good suit with a pair of wings, being asked by a President what he means to do with the shield. Onah, who directed and shares the screenplay credit with four others, plainly cares about that question, and the scenes in which Harrison Ford's Thaddeus Ross comes apart in the Oval Office are the ones where the film has a pulse. He has said he was "really hooked by Sam Wilson because there’s this great humanity that’s at the core of him", and for once a director's press line describes the film he was trying to make. It is not the film that got made.

The career so far runs small, large, small, large. The Girl Is in Trouble (2015) was a thesis feature, executive produced by Spike Lee. The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) was the first studio job, made for J.J. Abrams, and we have not reviewed it; the general verdict was that the plot was a mess and the tension never arrived, and nothing since has made that verdict look unfair. Then Luce (2019), which premiered at Sundance and is the film his reputation still rests on: a director who can hold an ensemble in a room and let a hard question sit there without resolving it. He gets performances. Kelvin Harrison Jr. has come back for a second film with him, which actors do not do for directors who waste them. Then Marvel called.

The pattern is not hard to read. Onah is good with actors and with people arguing about what they owe one another; the franchises want corridors and a third act. He names The Day of the Jackal, Le Samouraï and Point Blank as models, and Brave New World was built as a Washington thriller in the manner of The Winter Soldier. It got the Washington and mislaid the paranoia. It was shot in a murk that made the set pieces hard to follow and cut in a way that showed every join, and we found it watchable and not much more. What stayed with us was irritation, more than a merely watchable film usually produces, because we could feel the smaller, better picture underneath, two men and a shield and a question of trust, and the director so clearly in there trying to make it.

Whether that is bad luck or a limit we cannot yet say. A director handed someone else's franchise twice and returning something muddled twice has either been unlucky or has not yet learned how to fight for the film he wants inside the film he has been given. His next, Samo Lives, a Jean-Michel Basquiat biopic, is his own material with one man at the centre of it, and that is the scale on which he has done his best work. We would rather see that than a third corridor.